Well ...

Well, using asparagus fern to simulate conifers is okay, but the needle detail is too coarse for the smaller scales (S and below, and even O is pushing it). You really should put fine ground foam on the branches to get the correct in-scale texture.

Also, building a forest of trees with this stuff is going to drive you to distraction - building one tree can take an hour or more of drilling holes and gluing individual branches in. If you cover the fern with ground foam and you give the tree lots of branches - this can make a fantastic looking tree, but they're very time consuming.

For my money, the furnace filter techniques - if you cut the filters into thin big and little star shapes to simulate actual conifer branches, instead of just using a "blob" of furnace filter - work very well and it's a lot faster. The bottle brush methods also make nice looking trees fast if you use the secondary branch techniques to get a more natural looking conifer branch structure. Both of these techniques are demo'ed on my videos.

I'm covering 1100 square feet of layout with conifers and need thousands of them - so I gave up on the aparagus fern technique a long time ago as too time-intensive. Once you cover the out-of-scale ferns with fine ground foam, it doesn't look all that different from the furnace filter or bottle brush tree methods, either.

That's great for conifers but...

I am in need of oak and maple trees since these are common in New York and Connecticut which is the area that I model. I don't need alot of them because the area I am modeling is mostly urban in nature and thus there are no real forests here unless you are looking at a park. Even there you don't have thousands of trees.

You can't make oaks and maples out of furnace filters to my knowledge. So what would you recommend?

Irv

Go to Scenic Express

I recommend Scenic Express SuperTrees and SuperSage. With the appropriage coarse ground foam applied, these make knockout broadleaf trees ... all covered in my videos, of course (shameless plug).

We'll be running some scenery articles in future issue of MRH, too ... (any scenery modeling authors out there, hint, hint ...)

Here's another pine tree technique for smaller scales....

Loren Snyder shows a convincing method for making pine trees

in the smaller N, and Z scales in the following vid:

I believe that IS the Bottle

I believe that IS the Bottle Brush Method!!

[because the trees look a lot like bottle brushes!!!]

Works in HO too, though then rope fiber becomes a prefered material.

Woodland Scenics Trees

Have you ever tried Woodland Scenics trees? THose are the only ones I have experience with. I have mixed feelings about them.

They're basically metal armatures that come flat. The armatures have to be bent to produce a 3-d effect. the trunks have to be painted, either before or after bending and then you have to dip them in a glue and then into different colored ground foam to put the foliage on. They can come out nice but I haven't done many of them yet.

Irv